That thing you keep food cold in.

Friday we arrived at the cottage. Hooray! We flipped on the power, and everything turned on as expected. The fridge had power, light was on, and the compressor was running. We emptied the coolers into the fridge, and set about unpacking and getting settled in for the evening.

The next morning, as we were eating breakfast, we noticed that the milk seemed a bit warm. The juice too. In fact, nothing in the fridge was particularly cold. But it wasn't until the princess made some iced tea for her Dad (from frozen concentrate) that we realized we had a problem on our hand: the container of frozen concentrate was liquid!!

Augh!

The fridge was making the light and the fridge noises, but it wasn't making the COLD. The captain attempted some basic troubleshooting, but really - a fridge is a darned tricky thing to fix when you know nothing about the mechanics of a fridge.

You know it's bad when the user's manual comes out. (Oh, the life of a technical writer: your work is the option of last resort!) Electricity goes in here. The cold making happens here. The cold goes into the fridge. The end. There were no obvious problems on quick inspection, so we were stumped.

We ended up shunting all of our really perishable stuff (milk, yogurt, mayo, etc) over to our very kind neighbour's fridge, and the captain scooted in to town to get a couple of bags of ice for the cooler for the remaining less-perishable-but-still-need-to-be-kept-cold items, like the "iced" tea.

And now, we're in the market for a new fridge. I thought about buying a plug-in cooler for a short-term solution, but it will cost about as much as a cheap used fridge. I'm just not convinced I want to go the "cheap used fridge" route again. Hauling a fridge out to the island is no small feat! Why, why why why couldn't this have happened in the fall when we had all winter to haul the thing across the ice!?

Do you know anyone who is looking to offload a fridge that's in good running order and that isn't eleventy million years old?